May 30, 2007

Developer’s Diary: Maintaining an open dialogue with the community

“The key to this whole endeavor is working to affirm to visitors that this isn’t your typical producer-consumer interaction”

Kerberos and Lighthouse have a solid formula for success – create a space-strategy title, pack it with all the elements that make a strategy title very entertaining and then continue to add to the foundation until the palace is built.

Sword of the Stars was the foundation; Born of Blood is part of the building blocks. Sword of the Stars was billed as a 4X strategy game - a high-end strategy game that offers many factions and ways to play. While that can be a little daunting, the game managed to pull if off nicely. But with any successful title, there is bound to be an expansion and Sword of the Stars, published by Lighthouse Interactive, was no exception. That was when BoB, or Born of Blood, was conceived. According to the official press release:

"Sword of the Stars, originally released in August 2006, is a breakthrough 4X Strategy game that has returned gamers to the action-packed roots of the 4X genre with some new twists, including a 3D starmap and real-time combat resolution in a 3D environment – all available in multiplayer as well.

"In the official add-on 'Born of Blood' fans will see an increase in diversity, tactical depth and replay-value of the original game. SotS:BoB will give players a variety of new weapons, technologies, ship sections, scenarios and menaces to further expand and extend their gameplay experience. SotS:BoB is an essential upgrade for anyone involved in the Sword of the Stars universe."

Game features include:

• 1 new race - the Zuul - with 80+ ship sections and Tunnel Drive FTL technology.

• Massive Zuul slaver disks allow them to take slaves and use them to boost production on Zuul fortress worlds.

• Over 15 new weapons to battle with including Boarding Pods!

• Over 25 new technologies to research and deploy.

• New diplomatic Data and Comm systems. Make demands! Ask for help in attacking specific targets. Warn players off from the worlds you have yet to claim!

• More Intelligence technologies allow you to keep track of enemy ships, tech and battles.

• A new trade route system making economic control and output even more vital for military success. Star freighters ply the trade routes making money for the player but are also vulnerable to raiders. Active piracy and escort battles enter the SotS universe with a bang.

• Details combat results and status graphs allow you to track the rise or fall of your empire over time.

• A variety of new ship sections for the original races to help meet this new threat.

• More tactical combat options.

• New combat arena as ships are called upon to battle in the dangerous depths of Node-space.

• New random menaces / exploration threats.

• 2 new Scenarios (for both single- and multiplayer).

• 5 new galaxy types.

• Various GUI and multiplayer enhancements.

Kerberos, in preparing for this expansion, is sharing its developer diaries with GameZone.com. The first can be found at http://pc.gamezone.com/news/04_16_07_09_56AM.htm.

Radical Transparency. As in, “Gnarly.”
By Chris Stewart, Producer/Designer for Kerberos Productions

In a recent Wired article (I read it for the pictures, honest) the author, Clive Thompson, outlined the concept of Radical Transparency. The idea being that it was better for companies to talk directly and honestly with the public, rather than talk through careful, superlative-filled press releases – or worse yet, ignore them outright. The article spent a lot of time talking in terms of large corporations, but it still applied in a lot of ways to a Kerberos-sized design studio. And it also gave a name to what we actively decided to try on our message-boards nearly two years ago when we first announced Sword of the Stars – the PR talk would still be sent out to the various gaming sites, but if someone had a question, they could ask us - directly.

You’re thinking, “So, how’s that working out?” It’s as hard as we expected – Thompson said it in his article, you can’t start and then stop, and we’d anticipated this and we knew that would mean more work for us. When you make yourself available through boards or blogs or whatever, you have to keep going, and that’s a time consideration that anyone would rather not have when going final, but you do the best you can. And for us it’s working pretty well.

Thompson’s article specifically looks to big business because this is all very new to them. Frank discussion with the masses isn’t considered Business Basics 101. You’d expect however that the video-game industry would be better at it, given our access to technology and the interactive nature of our products, but it hasn’t really turned out to be the case. Interaction with the people who buy and play games still comes in two flavors – lots of big empty smiles or nothing at all. At least with nothing you know where you stand. Which means that the bulk of information about a game comes from press coverage – you’re reading some right now, for example. But in theory, communication can be far more direct – blogging being the current favorite, but we’re fans of message boards. With blogging, the company picks the topics and if you’re lucky, you get to respond with comments. On a message board everyone picks topics, often just off the cuff.

We are at the point where we can play-test our game, take a screenshot of something cool, post it to the message boards, and have a lively discussion about it, inside of ten minutes. That’s about as direct as you can get, short of inviting the public to come watch over your shoulder (and we’ve even done that a few times.) How could that not be a good thing compared to sporadic PR bursts, weeks or even months apart?

We live in an industry where the biggest movers and shakers are as big as it gets in the corporate world, and a lot of them are still using the playbooks Thompson says should be put down. Some have adopted faux transparency – there’s a lot of talk, but they’re saying nothing – requests for clarification get slow responses, if at all, but most just don’t talk to the consumer at all, they just talk at them. At least on the developer side we really want to talk about games with the people who play them. I don’t know that someone at a shoe corporation really, really wants to talk about shoes with the public, but a game dev will always want to swap tactics with the people playing their game – it just needs to happen more. When Kerberos was formed we determined that we would try as much as possible.

A big argument against this is that you, the public, will see the big board, but we’re not guarding 11 herbs and spices or something. Modders were already tinkering with the SotS demo well prior to the release of the final game. Our consumers are already reading our data files and discussing it. Which means the only secrets we’re concerned with are the surprises we designed into our game. Partly it’s by design – the random tech tree is working exactly as we’d intended, thwarting the dull fast-path to high-tech domination, and challenging players to come up with creative tactical and strategic responses. And partly it’s because for the money you pay for a game, even a modestly priced title like ours, you want some “holy crap!” moments. Above all else, these are the secrets we intend to preserve those for you. That’s not to say we don’t drop a few hints for fun;

“Look at his picture of this thing ravaging that ship.”

“Oh God! What the hell is that?”

“We’re not telling. You’ll have to wait for release.”

Bwah-ha-ha-ha. I guess you could say coy secrecy is both amusing for us and tantalizing for the fans. Even other players join in on the fun. Occasionally a new player will show up and exclaim that a whole planet disappeared off the map! What’s going on? And the entire community rubs their hands gleefully and as one replies, “You’ll see!”

Initially the Kerberos message board was started to inform players about our game – who are we and what were we trying to accomplish. Over the past year, it’s grown into a community, which in turn has helped inform us about our game. I don’t just mean beta testing, but suggestions that have been added to the game over two updates and the upcoming Born of Blood. PCs are magic, no doubt, but one game cannot be all things to all players at all times, so some suggestions just don’t fit, but when people post about GUI features that they would like to see, or a map idea, and it’s within our power, why not? And really, that is the creed we have tries to live up to in our interaction with the fan base…”Why not?” It’s amazing how many things open up when you ask that question in response to the phrase “It’s just not done in business”.

Most recently we’ve agreed to a fan mod for Sword of the Stars – members of the board asked if they created a new race of their own, could they get some help integrating it into the game engine. Our thought was, basically, if the fans are willing to get so into the game and do that much work, what kind of a company would we be not to dedicate a few days and an update to making sure all their work fit into the game. It’s a race that currently falls outside the game storyline, but we’d like to see it in action as much as them, and by design, it’s more than possible to give them a few special abilities with some effort on our part. One member of the boards sent us an early SotS poster, signed by the sci-fi stars attending a local convention – they have a planet in the game named after them. Another started and maintains a wiki for SotS – we can’t do enough to thank him, but we try as often as we can, because he has created a resource even we use. We will always try and reward the community, even in little ways – contributing board members from prior to our Web-server getting Penny Arcaded have their own special rank displayed under their names; Ante Priore Wangum

I know – Socrates is rolling in his grave, but everyone thinks it’s funny. And it’s not just an automatic measurement of post numbers – it was deliberately set up and manually granted to our early adopters. Our goal is to maximize access to the guts of the game – or the guts behind the game, more accurately. This includes daily posts, regular screenshots, and the occasional surprise for those in the board community. It is extra work, and work equals time and time equals money. But quite contrary, how has our garden grown? It’s turned into people who share the game with others – maybe by starting a fan site (with art assets provided directly from the dev artists), or writing fan fiction (after discussing the particulars of our alien races with our writer), or just taking the time to talk to us about the game and then sharing that info with the next person to show up to talk. That’s why it’s worth the extra work. Hard work, but worth it.

The key to this whole endeavor is working to affirm to visitors that this isn’t your typical producer-consumer interaction. This would not be a collection of gamers talking amongst themselves, occasionally visited by a developer or more often a PR wrangler doing the sociable restaurateur; “You suck!” “Hey, thanks for coming. Louie, the man is dry.” In order to do this, we have to talk as individuals, and this has required a certain agreement between us and everyone visiting the boards, and that agreement is that everyone here is a real human being and you should probably talk to them like you would if you met them on the street or at the library. Over the years people have grown use to a certain level of distance between them and the subjects of the boards they visit, creating a mixture of Lord of the Flies and when-the-cat-is-away, with a touch of kiss-my-ass-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it? But that doesn’t fly as well when a Kerberos person reminds you that you are talking about and to real human beings and that the board is a two-way street instead of a graffiti wall.

We don’t have a lot of time, so if we are to make ourselves available to a greater degree than normal, then we don’t want to waste it – anybody that starts a post with “This sucks.” as opposed to “I don’t like this – why is it like that?” means a great deal of our time spent on someone who’s really not interested in what we have to say anyhow. Which of course is time we could be spending talking to someone who is genuinely interested or even, y’know, working on our game.

Similarly, when we do get into a discussion, it can’t go on forever, but we do make the time for one thing consistently. We read every post, we think about every post, and if it has something to do with us or the game, we reply to that openly and honestly. Sometimes that means we say “Oooh, nice idea!” At other times it means we do think the unthinkable in terms of PR and say “Ah, not so much.” Again, an open flow of thoughts between public and developer as if both were real people sitting over a coffee.

This has, as we expected, not been the easiest of roads and asking that people treat each other as humans instead of ego speed bumps, has been a shock to some. But for all the ruffled feathers, I can count the number of actual unpleasant moments on one hand with enough digits left over to toss them the “L” sign.

What was counter-intuitive to a lot of surfers at first has resulted in an intelligent and self-regulating community that has allowed for growth without it becoming difficult for us to maintain the same level of contact. The same people who we’ve discussed various topics with before now often have the same discussion with people new to the board, allowing us to join in without having to cover well-tread ground. And more importantly there isn’t an acceptable level of “verbal violence.” Telling someone they suck (I’m using “you suck” as a bit of a blanket, but you know what I mean) isn’t met with “Dude, that was so awesome!” Instead it is met more by the cold stare of the community as a whole, not just a “mod.” It is, after all, a waste of their talk time too.

Since SotS does not end with Born of Blood, this trend will only continue, as more and more people discover our addition to the 4X genre. Can this philosophy of being regular Joes with the community survive a board population of 50K instead of 2K? From the look of the growth curve, time will tell. But we’ve planned out where we’re taking the game next, and we will continue to talk to anyone that wants to talk person to person. I don’t know if Wired putting a name to what we have been doing is going to help the process evolve. But it’s been two years of success for Kerberos, with the pros well outweighing the cons. All in all, at the end of the day, it feels better to us to be out there on the floor mixing it up with the fans than it would be taking their money through a arrow-slit in the door and handing back prepared statements with a pat on the head. That just doesn’t sound like fun and Kerberos Productions was born of the idea that if it ain’t fun, yer doin’ something wrong.

See you on the boards!

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